The Wildscaping Symposium: COVID-19 Update

My Wildscaping Symposium in Naturalistic Planting Design is now officially postponed.

Our new target date is fall 2022. Same place. Same time of year. A new sense of urgency to reconnect with our fellow humans and the natural world.

In the year of the virus almost no one saw coming, spring itself appears to be on hold.

While it’s nearly mid-May here in Ontario, we’re in a deep freeze worthy of February with four days in a row of bone-chilling temperatures and nightly frost advisories. There’s a blanket of fresh snow every morning that burns off with the light. I’m weeding the garden in my parka and Tibetan wool cap.

It’s not just us.

The entire East Coast has been double locked down in the icy grip of a spring polar vortex with the lowest recorded temperatures since 1977. Friends as far south as Virginia are cursing the cruel loss of much-loved peonies and magnolias. On top of everything else that’s going on, we’re on the collective last straw.

Meanwhile in Germany, the spring has been sunny and warm with gardens like Hermannshof no less splendid for being closed to the public for the first time in decades.

The Life Un-Cancelled

As we curse the fates of a dreadful spring in an even worse pandemic, let’s instead pause to celebrate a few things that are neither postponed nor cancelled.

Praise be for the mad renaissance in home learning. With face to face reality now forbidden and hours on our hands, Zoom sessions, Webinars and YouTube are now the channels of choice to deliver garden design and ecological content.

Here are but a few selections:

Garden Masterclass from the UK offers cozy tea-time Zoom chats every day of the week with a top-tier guest list of designers and plantsfolk from Europe and the US. Sessions are hosted by Garden Masters, Annie Guilfoyle and Nöel Kingsbury at 11 a.m. EST or 4 p.m. London time. The pair offer up high-tea quality content later uploaded for repeat viewing on YouTube (and yes, please mute your microphones.) Donations are quietly encouraged to keep the ball rolling.

Prairie whisperer Roy Diblik happened to debut his down to earth new YouTube channel just days before the outbreak. Roy is a complete natural at taking us through the basics of naturalistic planting design in a friendly, no fuss way. That said, he also sneaks in a lot of wise observations garnered from over 30 years of working with plants. New clips shot fresh daily with previews on Instagram.

If Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Tony Soprano and Andrew Dice Clay came together to hire a botanical hitman, you’d get Tony Santore of Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t. He claims to be an amateur botanist but this wiseguy is a friggin’ genius who botanizes everything from suburban strip malls to the California desert.  Start with his YouTube prairie rant PSA – Kill Your Lawn w/ Silphium terebinthinaceum and yes, Joey’s flair for language starts with the colour blue.

For more polite society, tune into the Ecological Landscape Alliance for their weekly virtual series A Walk through the Garden. This particular episode on pollination ecology features Rebecca McMackin, Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park – she’s a plant-obsessed/insect nerd with a gift for quirky, insightful story telling and unexpected details.

On the day to day level, my Facebook group Dutch Dreams appears to be a popular spot in the virtual ether.

Hort Happenings

Biophilia can never be cancelled. Over one million people from around the world tuned in from the depths of isolation to watch a free April weekend streaming of the documentary Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf. The event was sponsored by global gallery Hauser & Wirth, and there are talks with Director Thomas Piper for a repeat viewing in the near future.

If you missed the doc, catch up with the real thing with Piet’s latest interview with Wallpaper. Lately, the Maestro has also been busy taking inventory and scanning a lifetime of design plans and nearly each day on Instagram, he takes us through the latest wave of plants and trees coming into flower at Hummelo.

Meanwhile in Vitra

Even in isolation, Piet Oudolf has found a way to get his latest garden creation planted at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany – a kind of wonderland for innovative contemporary architecture.

Piet already sees this project as a model for how he can work in the future: “The assurance that it will be taken care in the future is very important. The other thing is that the travel ban made me realize that it is possible to make gardens from a distance. Thanks to friends and my network.”

This project installation was overseen by the remarkably plant-aware Landscape Architect, Bettina Jaugstetter. Married to Cassian Schmidt, Bettina jokingly calls herself Mrs. Hermannshof but the truth is that she has done as much as anyone to advance the concepts of the New German style in her private and public work.

Follow Bettina’s progress at Vitra and other projects on her brand new Instagram account:

Describing the indescribable

The pandemic has stifled so much of our culture and ability to interact through the usual channels.

It’s refreshing to hear a few brave writers speak out on coping with the new surreality. I was particularly taken by what English designer Dan Pearson (aka @coyotewillow) and his partner Huw Morgan had to say about it all on their online magazine Dig Delve.

Urban gardening takes root

Urban farming is exploding in the best way possible. A housebound crop of urbanites are quickly discovering what it takes to grow their own wherever they can and also create habitat for pollinators.

Here in Canada, super helpful DIY blogs like Savvy Gardening are more than ready to help you accelerate the vegetative learning curve. The Biggs family with father Steve and daughter Emma are multi-generational food phenoms with tons of info on their web site for adults and kids alike.

On the local front in my hometown Toronto, Cultivation activists are going full guerilla to plant up the streets with Grow Food Toronto.

Tick tock. Tick tock.

After what feels like a never-ending lockdown, things are very slowly opening up here in Canada. Landscapers and the hort trades in Ontario have only now just returned to work. Garden Centres are now open to virtual ordering and sidewalk pick-up and will hopefully soon open to socially-distanced customers to pick their own plants.

Planting it forward to 2021

After spending much of the past year working on the Wildscaping symposium, I was crushed by the reality of having to cancel. Mind you, that’s nothing compared to what others have faced since the outbreak.

On the positive side, I was astounded by the reaction and buzz the event generated when I finally announced the event in February.

That came after months of planning and a massive learning curve. I’m deeply fortunate to have met some absolute gurus in the field who’ve helped me to envision a higher level of what is possible in this realm.

All that effort is hardly wasted. What I learned on round one will only help to make the 2021 edition even more extraordinary. In the meantime, I’ll be activating myself to kick things into gear.

FYI: The new 2021 dates are September 30, Oct 1st, with workshops on October 2nd.

Special thanks on the journey this far to garden friend, Roy Diblik for his wisdom and advice. Credit also to fellow Canadian Amy Sanderson who helped organize the fantastic Beth Chatto Symposium, Lina Liubertaite, a dynamic entrepreneur who hosts garden design conferences in Lithuania, and Colleen Cirillo, the Director of Education at Toronto Botanical Garden.

I’m profoundly grateful to the phenomenal group of speakers who signed up for the project. To Piet, for giving it all a boost. Most of all, I thank my wife Troy for urging me forward in my quite relentless determination to make this happen despite whatever obstacles came my way. Only a global pandemic could stop me, and it did.

This is far from over.

Once the current isolation slowly begins to thaw, I know that plants and all they attract will play an even greater role in the transformed nature of our everyday lives.

We will meet again.